Gad, Sir! Comics!

“Best of the year” lists have been mushrooming, but, understandably, most of them tend to emphasise longer, more substantial works: graphic novels, collected editions and ongoing series. Here, by contrast, are some of the shorter pieces of comics I have enjoyed through the year, none of them long enough to fill a single issue. (But you can, at least, click the pictures below to make them bigger.)

”You’re A Good Man, John Stuart Mill” by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. Not all of van Lente and Dunlavey’s Action Philosophers (Evil Twin Comics) worked for me, either as entertaining comics or as potted accounts of the thought of major philosophers. But this spot-on Charles Schulz pastiche hit both targets perfectly.


Mark Waid’s super-hero origin stories from 52. As superhero comics sank into a congealed mass of stodgy continuity, Waid performed small miracles every week by boiling down the essence of each of DC’s main cast and presenting it in just two pages. It didn’t hurt that the series attracted artists like Brian Bolland and Adam Hughes, long lost to the more lucrative field of cover illustration, back to telling stories instead. Here are Waid and Hughes on Wonder Woman, from 52 issue 12.


My Own Genie by Jamie Smart. British children’s humour comics have long been refreshingly free of moral didacticism. If My Own Genie was a TV series, Lula, after wishing for something selfish and irresponsible, would have to put it right, while learning a Valuable Life Lesson. In The Dandy, she can just compound the mayhem, while having a good time. It helped that the once-staid publisher D C Thompson is willing to publish artwork as wild as that provided by Smart. This example is from The Dandy Summer Special 2007, as the strip was sadly missing from the regular title for most of the year.


”Maggie La Loca” by Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets Vol 2 Issue 20, Fantagraphics). If brother Gilbert is the Gene Kelly of comics, all flash and effort, Jaime is the Fred Astaire: he makes it all look so simple that it’s easy to underestimate the amount of talent, skill and craft he employs. Plus, I’ve got a soft spot for long-running fictions that age their characters in real time.


Tom Gauld’s letter column illustrations from The Guardian. Weird little flights of fancy that brighten my Saturdays. This one is from 1 December.


Eleanor Davis’s pieces in Mome (Fantagraphics) are often the highlights of this consistently interesting and well-produced anthology. Their unsettling charm makes me wonder if this is how the first generation of comfortable burghers felt when reading the earliest, unbowdlerised Grimm folk tales. These panels are from “Stick and String” in Mome issue 8.


Bryan Talbot’s 3-page History of British Comics, using his Alice in Sunderland style and published by The Guardian to accompany the BBC’s Comics Britannia TV series. I missed this when it came out. For the next few days, my every conversation began, “You didn’t happen to buy The Guardian on Saturday, did you?”


The Mini Marvels, by Chris Giarrusso, appear seemingly at random and often unheralded in various Marvel comics. Really, they should get the cover every time, because Giarrusso’s kiddy versions of the Marvel superheroes are a charming delight, matched only by Jeff Parker’s occasional short X-Men strips with Colleen Coover. This panel comes from “Hulk Date”, which appeared in Spider-Man Family issue 3.


Jack Black from Viz comic. Of all Viz’s parade of grotesques, nothing quite captures the true, vindictive, self-righteous, Daily Mail-reading face of modern Britain quite like Jack Black.


And a Merry Christmas to you, too

While you’ve been looking at a static, un-updated blog, I’ve been filling my hard drive with unuseable posts.

There were several attempts to review recent comics (such as the Hibernia reprint of The Thirteenth Floor, written by John Wagner and Alan Grant and drawn by José Ortiz, above), but there wasn’t really anything interesting or amusing that I wanted to say about them.

There was my attempt, sparked by a remark by John Sutherland to the effect that the price of hardback novels had remained constant as a share of average income throughout the twentieth century, to see if the same was true of The Dandy over its seventy-year life. But while my rough calculations suggested that 2d (old pence – 240 of them to the pound) in 1937 was indeed about the same proportion of weekly GDP per head as £1.99 is now, that post fell apart when I realised that The Dandy now only comes out every two weeks, and is, for the first time, a different price from The Beano (95p), so I wasn't comparing like for like. In any case, I was unsure about the figures I was using for GDP, as national accounts data only began to be collected the way they are now after World War Two, and for population, as neither 1937 nor 2007 was a census year. And I couldn’t find the exact quotation from John Sutherland, either. Fell at three successive fences, that one.

And there was the humorous post, attempting to link this poll, showing that a quarter of Britons could not name Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace, with Cat Sullivan’s “Merry Xmas, Jesus” strip in the new issue of Viz (no 171, Christmas 2007, below). Maybe include some sarky remark about how “don’t know” was actually the most accurate answer, given that the whole Bethlehem story is such an obvious and clumsy ret-con. But I couldn’t make it sing.



And then there was the self-pitying post about how I couldn’t write any good posts this last week. Just be thankful I spared you that one.

Oh … Right.

Anyway, a review of Tamara Drewe should be along shortly. I’ve got things to say about it. Interesting or amusing things? You’ll have to be the judge.

The latest “Everyone’s A Critic” column on Blog@Newsarama asks whether comics critics shy away from discussing art because of a lack of an art-critical vocabulary, and whether the language of comics criticism needs specialised terms of its own. Unfortunately, I cannot now get Blog@Newsarama to load, so here is what I had prepared for the comments section.

Is criticism of art in comics inhibited by ignorance of art-critical vocabulary? More likely, it reflects a lack of engagement with, and sensitivity to, drawing and colour. Much of the vocabulary of art criticism simply takes straightforward concepts and gives them an Italian label. If I write of Alex Toth’s chiaroscuro, or the challenge of inking Gene Colan’s sfumato pencils, I gain nothing over writing of Toth’s organisation of light and dark on the page, or of Colan’s hazily shaded pencilling. Of course, there are also many terms that have no direct use in comics criticism. There is not much call for discussions of the support or of the impasto of the paint.


Usually.

Colour theory is a little harder to express in concise English, but that is not, I think, why I tend to neglect colour when I write about comics: rather, I am not very sensitive to colour, and tend to have little interesting to say about it. But if I did witter on about “complementary colour” or somesuch, at least a hypothetical confused reader could look the term up in the dictionary and find a definition that applies precisely.

Dangers emerge when we borrow terms that do not make a perfect fit with comics, and either carry misleading overtones or change their meaning as a result. This is particularly true of the language of film criticism. If we talk about “camera angles”, we imply the existence of an objective mechanism recording something that already exists, which is, generally speaking, not a good description of a comics artist. If we talk about “cutting” and “panning”, we get tangled in the different relationships that cinema and comics have with time. For example, in a film, a pan must be a movement through both time and space. In a comic, a sequence of panels showing physically adjacent parts of a scene need not have any fixed chronological pattern.

Now, there are many comic books that seem to want to be second-rate impersonations of cinema – I have even seen “it looks like a storyboard” used as praise – but I doubt we can put the blame for that onto intellectual limitations fostered by an inappropriate and limited critical vocabulary. Limited ambition for, and understanding of, the medium, and abasement before the most pervasive and financially successful means of telling stories of our age, are much more likely culprits.

Do we need a comics-specific language of criticism? As suggested already on the Blog@ thread, we already have some terms, such as panel, gutter and word balloon. But if I were to start using entirely different terms – frame, space, speech container – it wouldn’t take long for an alert reader to catch on. It might, however, suggest to that reader that I was not be familiar with what I was writing about. But a specialist vocabulary is often used to exclude outsiders as much as to aid rapid communication among insiders, which does not seem to me to be desirable for a marginal and disreputable artform like comics. Our criticism should be accessible to outsiders, on the rare occasions that they encounter it.

I have yet to read Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (it is in the queue behind a couple of huge books, Jenny Uglow’s biography of Hogarth and Vic Gatrell’s more general account of eighteenth-century English satire, so it may be a while before Groensteen gets his turn), but I am instinctively dubious of the need to indulge in a sudden orgy of neologism. If terms are needed, they will no doubt emerge, but it is surely better if they do so organically.

Having said that, I do sometimes wish for a term which, like “cinematic” or “poetic” suggests a medium which is making the most of its own resources. “Comic booky” is used to insult productions in other media by suggesting that they are silly, gaudy and shallow. But, then again, “prosaic” and “theatrical” are usually used as insults, and both prose and theatre manage to stumble on somehow.

Update, later that day: Added link to the original post, now that I can load Blog@Newsarama again.


Panels
The Critics by John Fardell, Viz, 2000, reprinted in Viz: The Bag of Slugs, IFG/Fulchester Industries, 2002

“Zzutak: The Thing that Shouldn’t Exist!!”, script by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, originally published in Fear issue 3, reprinted in Monster Masterworks, Marvel Comics, 1989

This is a belated addition to the argument about whether or not trade paperback (or hardback) collections of comics series should be brought out hard on the heels of their original serialised publication. It was begun by Brian Hibbs, who worries that too prompt or certain a collection damages periodical sales. His position was opposed by, most clearly, Christopher Butcher, who does not think that potential sales of collections should be inhibited to artificially protect the periodicals.

Now, unlike Brian and Chris, who are both successful retailers, I have little knowledge of consumer behaviour. I only know my own, which may well be untypical. But I do know that I am much more likely to buy a collected edition of a series that is still fresh in my mind, whether or not I read it in serialised form. Leave it too long, and my attention will have wandered over to the latest shiny object.

Some confirmation that this is not too unusual comes from another medium. Over the weekend, there were two prestigious new feature-length productions broadcast on British television: on the BBC, the latest play by Stephen Poliakoff, Joe’s Palace; on ITV, a new adaptation of A Room with a View. DVDs of each were on sale in high street shops on Monday.

Prestigious or not, neither of these is likely to have been rushed out to beat the pirates, who have bigger, Hollywood, fish to fry. More probably, the marketing men have realised that their best option for maximising sales is to make the programmes readily available to those who saw the broadcasts and decided they’d like a copy to keep, and to those who missed them, but read about them in the next day’s newspapers, or heard about them from friends. Even a short delay, and they’d just be two more anonymous titles on the classic TV racks.

Nothing in comics is quite that immediate, though a lot of it is timebound. For example, it would be wise of DC to rush out a collection of the two-page origin strips from 52 and Countdown rapidly, while they are still current. Because, attractive as many of them are, there is no way I am buying the rest of Countdown in order to get them.


Panels
Spoilt Bastard, reprinted in Viz: The Bag of Slugs, IFG/Fulchester Enterprises, 2002

From ghosties


and ghoulies


and long-leggedy beasties


and things that go bump in the night


good Lord protect us.

(First published by Walter de la Mare as an old Scottish prayer in Come Hither, 1923)

Panels
My Dead Girlfriend Volume 1 “A Tryst of Fate” by Eric Wight, Tokyopop, 2006

Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles, art by Simon Donald, I think, reprinted in Viz: The Sausage Sandwich, John Brown Publishing, 1991

Daredevil “Stilts” by Frank Miller (scripter/storyteller), Klaus Janson (penciller/inker/colourist), Sam Rosen (letterer) and Dennis O’Neil (editor), Daredevil issue 186, September 1982, reprinted in Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller Volume 3, Marvel Comics, 2001

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2 by Alan Moore (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist), Ben Dimagmaliw (colourist), Todd Klein (letterer) and Scott Dunbier (editor), America’s Best Comics, 2002-2003

They may have lost a comic, but it seems that Wallace and Gromit will gain a statue, in animator Nick Park’s home town of Preston, Lancashire.

Putting up statues of cartoon characters is something of a trend. There’s an Andy Capp in Hartlepool (Reg Smythe’s birthplace) and Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx share a metaphorical plinth in Dundee (headquarters of publisher D C Thomson).


Round here on Tyneside, the local heroes are the characters created by Chris and Simon Donald and their cohorts for Viz. So, who do you reckon should be immortalised in the Bigg Market? The Fat Slags? Sid the Sexist? Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles? Or perhaps Finbarr Saunders and His Double Entendres would provide a suitably impressive erection.

Fnarr, fnarr.

Oh, and if you doubt that the Viz folk are of suitable character to be immortalised in bronze, remember that, as Lew Stringer reminds us, Andy Capp was not just a drunken layabout, but also a wife-beater.

Pictures
Photo of Andy Capp statue by Stan Laundon
Photo of Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx statues by Stonefaction

Sean Kleefeld recently asked what comics he should look out for when visiting Britain this August. I started jotting down some thoughts, but it quickly became clear that there was too much for a simple comment, so here it all is as a blog entry, you lucky people.

A quick disclaimer: I make no claims to expertise, nor to be a definitive arbiter of taste. I would welcome additions and alternative viewpoints. But I hope this post will be of use to anyone taking a holiday here.

Background
If you want to swot up before arrival, there is nothing better than Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury’s book Great British Comics: Celebrating a Century of Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes. As the title suggests, this is a big, lavishly illustrated history of British comics , actually stretching as far back as the creation of the first continuing comic strip character, Ally Sloper, in 1867, and beyond.


If you are globe-trotting this summer, you might prefer The Essential Guide to World Comics by Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks, which has a good chapter on British comics, and other chapters on US, Japanese, South East Asian, Franco-Belgian, European, South and Central American, Scandinavian, and Australasian comics, plus one on a miscellany of other countries (it’s quite an eye opener, particularly revealing how comics sales are falling everywhere, even in Japan and Mexico).


For history on the web, start with Comics UK.

For the current British Comics scene, John Freeman’s Down the Tubes is indispensable. Among other things, it features a news section and listings of all current professional comics periodicals and books. The Forbidden Planet International Blog is also well worth checking. For British small press comics, try Bugpowder.

The magazine Comics International used to be highly valuable, not least for the directory of comics shops in Britain in the back. Unfortunately, since changing publisher a year ago, only one issue has appeared. Perhaps it should change its title to All-Star Comics International?

Periodicals
If you read all that history, you’ll get the impression that the dominant form of comic in Britain is the weekly anthology. Once, this was true, but no longer.

The twin giants of the children’s humour weekly comics still stand: The Beano and The Dandy, published by D C Thompson. Each contains a mix of 1 to 3 page-long stand-alone strips featuring continuing characters. The target audience is under-10s. The Beano has recently spawned a spin-off monthly, BeanoMax, aimed at 8-12 year olds, and containing a mix of strips and magazine features.


D C Thompson also publishes small-format digests featuring Beano and Dandy characters, and Classics from the Comics, a monthly reprint magazine mostly containing material from the 1950s through to the 1970s: I reviewed an edition here.

Of the boys’ weekly adventure anthologies, only 2000AD remains, though it might now more accurately be described as a nostalgic men’s weekly adventure anthology. I reviewed some recent editions here and here.


2000AD also has a monthly counterpart, the Judge Dredd Megazine, which mixes strips with articles (though in this case the articles are all about comics, and not just those from the 2000AD stable), and a reprint magazine, 2000AD Extreme Editions, which generally gathers together serialised weekly strips into a single lump.

The other great remaining anthology is the monthly Viz comic, the Geordie masterpiece of scabrous humour and topical satire, which mixes the classic children’s comic style of humour strip with outright filth and mock-articles in the style of the British tabloid newspapers. I reviewed an issue here, but be careful – it is marked “not for sale to children” for good reason.


The other long-standing comics format, the boys’ adventure comics digest, containing a complete self-contained story told in one or two panels per page, is now represented only by Commando (sometimes referred to as Commando Picture Library), which specialises in war stories – mostly, but not exclusively – about the Second World War.


Specialised girls’ comics have vanished, so far as I know, replaced by magazines.

So are British comics dying out? Not at all, but they have mutated. What you will find by the dozen in the Down the Tubes listings are children’s magazines based on a single franchise – anything from Tellytubbies to Thunderbirds, from Lazy Town to Shaun the Sheep - which mix a minority of comic-strip pages with puzzles, articles, posters and readers’ drawings. I have reviewed a couple that I rather like - Wallace and Gromit and Doctor Who Adventures – and one that I don’t - Action Man ATOM.

There is also the occasional children's magazine featuring a minority of comics pages but which is not tied to a particular franchise, such as Toxic.


Those seeking variant additions of US comic-books will also find a number of super-hero comics on the shelves, generally reprinting the contents of two US comics in each.

A couple of other periodicals are worth mentioning.

Private Eye is a magazine that mixes investigative journalism, political muckracking, and topical humour. It contains a lot of cartoons, including some in strip form. Two of its current political strips draw their inspiration from old British comics, satirising the Conservative Party in the style of Lord Snooty and His Pals, a long-running Beano series, and Prime-Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown and his faction within the Labour Party in the style of Scottish classic comic-strip The Broons.


Spaceship Away is a semi-professional publication that started as a Dan Dare fanzine. It is notable for containing a brand new Dan Dare comic strip drawn by Don Harley, the long-term assistant to original series artist and creator Frank Hampson. It is also reprinting other 1950s SF strips, such as the adaptation of the radio series Journey into Space shown here.



You will also find comic strips elsewhere - for example, Fortean Times, a magazine about unexplained phenomena, ghosts, UFOs and all that jazz, features a one-page strip every month by the magnificent cartoonist Hunt Emerson. He might also still be drawing Firkin the Cat for the soft porno magazine Penthouse, but I wouldn't know about that ...


Buying periodicals
You won’t find many of these titles in comics shops in Britain – for the most part, those concentrate on American comics, graphic novels, and translations of manga. You might find 2000AD, the various Doctor Who titles and, if you are lucky, Spaceship Away and possibly some locally produced small-press titles.

For the rest, your best bet is the newsagents, particularly the big branches of W H Smith on the high streets of town and city centres. I recently counted about 90 comics titles on the shelves of the central Newcastle branch.

Most will be grouped in a section of children’s comics, which will be immediately recognisable because it is so untidy. Most British comics these days come with some cheap toy or novelty sellotaped, gummed or polybagged to the front, which makes shelving them difficult (and restricts browsing).

But look around the shop too. The three different Doctor Who titles might be in different places - Doctor Who Adventures with the children’s comics, Doctor Who Magazine with film and TV magazines (where you will sometimes find 2000AD and its spin-offs too), Doctor Who Battles in Time with partworks.

Private Eye will normally be shelved with current affairs magazines, and Viz either there or with men’s magazines like Maxim or Loaded.

Update, 6 June: added request for other views, expanded material on Private Eye, added mentions of US comic book reprints and Hunt Emerson.
Update, 7 June: added reference to Toxic.

Next – Part Two: Books (graphic novels, reprint collections, annuals and children’s albums)

Pictures and panels
Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury Great British Comics: Celebrating a Century of Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes, Aurum Press, 2006; cover shows Korky the Cat by Charles Grigg

Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks The Essential Guide to World Comics, Collins & Brown/Chrysalis Books, cover by Roger Langridge, 2005

The Beano issue 3383, 2 June 2007, published by D C Thompson. Cover shows Dennis the Menace and Gnasher; interior panel from Minnie the Minx, both drawn by Tom Paterson

The Dandy issue 3417, 2 June 2007, published by D C Thompson, interior panels from Ollie Fliptrick, art by Dixon

2000AD prog 1539, 30 May 2007, published by Rebellion, interior panels from Nikolai Dante “Thieves’ World” part 2 by Robbie Morrison (script), Simon Fraser (art), Gary Caldwell (colours) and Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Viz issue 165, May 2007, published by Dennis Publishing, interior panels from Sting and the Riddle of the Horse’s Arse (uncredited)

Commando issue 4007, May 2007, published by D C Thompson, “Wolf Patrol” (uncredited, reprinted from 1993)

Toxic issue 94, 6 June-19 June 2007, published by Egmont Magazines, interior panels from Team Toxic "Getting to the Bottom of It", art by Lew Stringer

Private Eye issue 1186, 8 June-21 June 2007, Pressdram Limited; strip The Broon-ites drawn by Henry Davies

Spaceship Away issue 7, Autumn 2005, published by Rod Barzilay; interior panels from Journey Into Space episode 1 “Planet of Fear”, written by Charles Chilton, art by Ferdinando Tacconi, reprinted from Express Weekly, 1956

Weighty Tome
I am still reading and pondering Bryan Talbot’s Alice In Sunderland: An Entertainment. I’ll post a review later in the week, but in the meantime, have a look at the review by Jog, which chimes with what I have read of the book so far.



One thing that strikes you about Alice even before you begin to read is what extraordinary value it represents as an artefact. I know it is philistine to consider the value of books by the yard, but for £16.99 – about the price of a typical hardback prose novel - you get a 330 page, full colour, 28 by 20 cm volume. The blessed thing weighs 1.4 kilograms.

In an article in the Sunday Times last month, Bryan Appleyard suggested that the recent commercial success of graphic novels owed something to the arrival on the international publishing scene of cheap Chinese printers. Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, the UK publishers of Talbot’s new book, reckoned that the British edition of Jimmy Corrigan would have cost about £30 or £40 a copy if it had been printed anywhere else. Who knows what Alice in Sunderland would have cost?

So give a cheer for globalisation, and say a prayer that not too many four-year-old bookbinders were pressed into service to bring us our cheap reading pleasure.

Kow-towing to the Mainstream Media
Speaking of British national newspapers, today’s issue of The Guardian reviews the first issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. Reviews of graphic novels in the upmarket national press are becoming, if not commonplace, then unexceptional, but it’s a rare thrill to find a monthly pamphlet reviewed as a piece of story-telling like this (as opposed to the press coverage of Captain America issue 25, which concentrated on the event of Cap’s death, rather than the way the tale was told). A pity that a witless sub-editor should write "what a shame it's only a comic," when the reviewer, Emily Watson, is much more even-handed.

Update
I wrote earlier that Viz now has “a circulation of about 150,000 or 250,000 depending on who you talk to”. Steve Holland has posted some more up-to-date sales estimates to his blog, Bear Alley, putting Viz’s sales at around 95,000: a big drop, but still enough for it to be the third best-selling comic in the UK. Visit Steve’s blog to find out the top two.

Foreshadowing: a Masterclass
This panel of Batwoman in her secret identity was published by DC Comics in 1963:



Is that planning ahead, or what?


Panel from:
Batman “Prisoner of Three Worlds” by Bill Finger (writer), Sheldon Moldoff (penciller) and Charles Paris (inker), Batman issue 153, February 1963, reprinted in Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told Volume 2, DC Comics, 2007

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, issue 1: “The Long Way Home”, part 1 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters), Scott Allie (editor); cover by Jo Chen. Dark Horse Comics, March 2007, 24 pages of strip, US$2.99

Yes, it’s Buffy by Whedon, so you already know if you like this recipe or not. This is setting up a 4-issue story, and has the pacing, incident and patter you’d expect. The only drawbacks – Great Muppety Odin aside – are Whedon’s use of homebrew-phonetic spelling for some of the Slayerettes (after some pondering, I decided to read Leah as Irish and the other girl as Danish, but who knows?) and the return of the “US military versus Buffy” trope. Because the Initiative didn’t give us quite enough hours of dullness back in Season 4, I suppose.



What I really want to draw attention to is Georges Jeanty’s artwork. His compositions are spot on: there were no occasions anywhere in reading this issue when I felt myself having consciously to decide where my eye should go next, either within a panel or across a page. He has managed to incorporate likenesses of the TV actors without making them either unrecognisable or obvious tracings of photographs. A good test is that the one new character who gets significant face-time, General Voll, looks neither more nor less real and fully-rendered than Buffy, Xander and Dawn. Jeanty has a solid command of anatomy, facial expression and perspective; and with inker Andy Owens he provides craggy lines and shadows that give bite to the finish. Top stuff.



Dark Horse lets the package down a little by printing a Jo Chen cover which depicts Buffy as at least six feet tall, and by putting four successive pages of adverts in the middle of an action sequence.


Hunter & Painter by Tom Gauld. Buenaventura Press 2007, 18 pages of strip, US$4.95

The eccentricities of this little booklet start with its format – 24cm wide by 10cm high, bound on the short side – but don’t end there. Gauld gives us the story of a caveman who has hunted every animal he knows, and a caveman who has painted every hunting scene he can think of. The tone is mundane, mixing the cheerful and the melancholy. The art is as lumpy and stylised as cave art itself. Here is Painter, trying something new:



But don’t worry, there’s a happy ending. A very engaging oddity.


Jack Staff volume 2 issue 13 by Paul Grist (writer/artist) and numerous colourists. Image Comics, February 2007, 27 pages of strip, US$3.50

This is an all-cliché issue: a parallel world where the good guys are bad guys, characters stepping outside the panel borders, a chimp, undead versions of British sit-com characters (what? that isn’t a cliché? Well, it should be!); but Grist handles proceedings with his customary grace, charm and good humour, and the chimp has his own theme song, so I’m happy enough.



Viz issue 163, with contributions by Alex Collier, Simon Ecob, John Fardell, Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris & Joel Morris, Paul Palmer, Cat Sullivan, Barney Farmer & Lee Healey, Christina Martin & James MacDougall, Will Freeman, Tony Coffey and Robert Doyle. Dennis Publishing, March 2007. 21 pages of strip (out of 52), £2.60.

Viz has now been around long enough to be easily overlooked – and, indeed, sales have fallen from its million-plus heyday to a circulation of about 150,000 or 250,000 depending on who you talk to. But Viz’s contents have a consistent reliability about them: it’s the same mix of crude sexual and scatological humour and sharply topical social and cultural references, served up in the style of Beano-esque comic strips and pastiche tabloid articles.



The highlight of this issue is “Jack Black and the Crack Continuum”, in which Jack and his dog Silver spend their summer holiday in the countryside, helping Aunt Meg defend her class-A drug dealership from an unwelcome intruder. Pedallos, a submarine, a bullet to the head and almond and sultana cake all feature in this parody of cozy boy’s adventure stories.